hans-jörg georgi :

The heavens are the space we hold for our hopes, and also the space in which we yearn to spend the afterlife. They are everywhere we are not. So much so that since time immemorial, they have sheltered our gods, both benevolent and threatening, as well as our thoughts, consuming themselves in conjecture and dreams.

For Hans-Jörg Georgi, skies are the only possible escape from our extinction. Ever since he was born in Frankfurt in 1949, he struggled to find his place – as any child who feels “different”. And since poliomyelitis paralysed his legs and prevented him from walking, he took to imagining gravity-defying aircrafts. Twenty years ago, he stated with messianic fervor: “I want to do good for the world and I am taking you all on a trip”.
To live up to his promise, he started building a fantastic fleet – made of shoe boxes, as if to add to the irony – capable of enduring a long and arduous journey. This is the central paradox of art brut: Beauty – the only aspect of our world that makes it worth living in – is often created by the most deprived and underprivileged among us. And even if the world is still not perfectly bearable, Beauty offers us an escape into unconditional empathy. As François Salmon puts it in the preface of our show’s catalog, “this gradual ascension from the sensible to the intelligible brings us to both a spiritual elevation and the universalization of our love.”

Georgi is thus a spiritual son of Ut-napishtim, the sumerian Noah whose story is exposed on 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian tablets. Both put their infinite mercy and compassion at the service of saving the world. Georgi soberly sums it up in a phrase: “There is nothing but love.”
This is the first time Georgi’s fleet is displayed in an art gallery since 2014, when it was shown during a group exhibition at La maison rouge in Paris.